Tents

MSR is the Porsche of backpacking tents. These beauties, a brand of Cascade Designs, are sleek and comfy with cutting-edge construction that maximizes space and sturdiness while minimizing weight. The new top-of-the-line double-occupancy model is the Carbon Reflex 2 , which weighs just 3 pounds, including poles, stakes and rain fly -- lighter than many one-person tents. You get an airy body with twin double-zippered doors front and...

Police in Westminster are trying to determine what a man found dead on the patio of a fumigated house was doing there. Just before 6 p.m. Tuesday, police were called to a home in the 14400 block of Monroe Lane after a worker for a Southern California pest control company went to check on a customer's home and found the body of a man inside the company's fumigation tent. The unidentified man was shirtless and holding a black T-shirt and hooded sweatshirt, but had no identification.

My sympathy goes out to those young people from Avalon who are going to classes in tents ("Avalon Students Roughing It as Contamination Closes School," Sept. 26). We had the same situation. I graduated from Roosevelt High School in 1940. This was in Boyle Heights. There had been a large earthquake in the early 1930s. There simply wasn't enough money to repair all of the buildings. So, we had some of our classes in tents. The tent classes were just as good as the regular classes. No big deal!

There are certain long-dormant rock acts and broken-up bands that cause fans to wring their hands in anticipation of musical detente. These are bands that fairly demand to be reunited in the service of a career-defining set at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. And then there was the Cult's performance on opening night of the fest's second weekend: an exercise in Dad Rock gone wrong that left most of its audience dazed and disappointed with the British band's baffling decision to omit most of its biggest hits in favor of catalog fare and new “compositions” that left the faithful scratching their heads.

JERUSALEM - About 250 Palestinian activists set up dozens of tents Friday on a large plot of land east of Jerusalem that Israel has designated as the site of a new settlement. The Palestinians hope the tent village - called Bab al-Shams, or Gate to the Sun - will prevent Israel from going forward with the E1 project, said a spokesman for the group, Abdullah abu Rahmeh. Israel plans to build thousands of housing units as part of the project, which Palestinians and much of the international community have condemned as a step that could disrupt travel between the northern and southern portions of the West Bank and make it more difficult for the Palestinians to create a cohesive state.

It takes more than the Oct. 1 earthquake to stop Ticor Title Insurance, which has been operating its Rosemead plant out of tents and trailers since a strong aftershock on Oct. 4. "I understand that the epicenter was across the street," Joann H. Shanley, a spokesman for the firm, said about the 4 a.m. aftershock. "But we got our tents set up that day, and there were no delays. Our computers were never down."

Tent City II, which has sheltered about 200 homeless people in downtown Los Angeles for the last week, will be vacated today but reoccupied Monday or Tuesday under a compromise agreement reached late Friday by organizer Ted Hayes and the state Department of General Services.

"Any camp," the artist and architectural visionary Constant Nieuwenhuys once argued, "is a form, however primitive, of a city. " There were times when 2011 seemed to be unfolding as a test of that proposition. Thanks to the Occupy Wall Street protests that began in Zuccotti Park in New York and spread quickly to Los Angeles and other cities, rising frustration over income inequality began to take on an unmistakable architectural and urban form. Forget the blobs, boxes, starchitects and destination buildings that dominated much of the last decade.

There will be no pink underwear. Late last year, officers from San Bernardino County's Central Juvenile Hall, the state's most crowded youth jail, took a trip to Arizona. About to become the first in California to house juvenile inmates in military-style tents, they arrived in Maricopa County, Ariz., where Sheriff Joe Arpaio runs famously unpleasant jails, forcing inmates to wear pink underwear, eat green bologna and live in tents that outrage civil rights activists.

CAIRO — The ragged effigy of a fallen leader dangles from a lamppost over the remnants of a dying revolution. Those left from the uprising that swelled through Tahrir Square last year and brought down Hosni Mubarak live in tents, harassed and cursed, but mostly forgotten. TV cameras no longer perch on balconies; the great banners have been spooled away. The slogans of rebellion have been pressed onto T-shirts, and tourists, their expressions saying they somehow expected more, take pictures, trying to summon the images that captivated the world those many months ago. But the joy has turned sullen, and the nation has slipped back to the burdens of life while these defiant few still hunker with their placards and rage.

Here's a telling statistic about the 2014 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival: On the first of two three-day weekends more than 3,000 people paused to have their makeup or hair styled by professionals. With approximately 90,000 people attending per weekend, that is, of course, a small minority, but it is a colorful minority. It also in no way reflects how many opt to go the do-it-yourself route. This reporter is no amateur anthropologist, but after a day and a half in the desert it was becoming increasingly clear that the most endangered species at Coachella were soon likely to be those attendees without rainbow adornments on their face or in the hair. Not wanting to go the way of rock bands without keyboards, on Saturday morning it was my time to assimilate and become a Coachellian.

April 13, 2014 | By Randall Roberts, Los Angeles Times Pop Music Critic

It's a perennial theme, one that manifests itself throughout genre and era: the idea of getting lost in music. Whether it's Pharrell imploring us to "Lose Yourself to Dance," Eric B. and Rakim's "Let the Rhythm Hit 'Em" or the old-time standard "The Tennessee Waltz," the notion of vanishing inside the rhythms, of losing all sense of time and space and letting the proverbial troubles glide away, is something that draws many -- but not all -- festival...

A makeshift bucket brigade hauled 14 pails of mud and slush from the tent that Um Mahmoud shares with a dozen other Syrian refugees in a ramshackle settlement here in the Bekaa Valley, now blanketed with snow that lends an alpine sheen to the rugged stretch that extends to the Syrian border. While holiday-makers from Beirut hastened to the hills with sleds and toboggans, piling souvenir snow onto their vehicles for the drive home, there was nothing merry about the weekend blizzard for the multitudes of Syrians living rough in makeshift camps scattered throughout the region.

- When "Side Show" first appeared on Broadway in 1997, the critics had plenty of nice things to say but audiences weren't rushing out in droves to see a musical about conjoined twins. The show closed after 91 performances. But this musical by Bill Russell (book and lyrics) and "Dreamgirls" composer Henry Krieger (music) has been haunted by its unrealized potential. A cult favorite that many musical theater aficionados feel deserves another crack at the big time, the show has just gotten a major overhaul at La Jolla Playhouse in a co-production with the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

PLACERVILLE, Calif. - At Hangtown Haven, Wednesdays were family night, and on movie night 30 to 40 residents watched DVDs on a mammoth outdoor TV. Residents nursed one another through drug and alcohol detoxification and helped heart and stroke patients recover in their tents. The mayor championed the endeavor, churches embraced it and one police chief said it brought down crime. But on Friday, what is believed to be California's only authorized, self-governing campground for homeless people shut down.

CAIRO -- A muggy sunrise over Cairo on Wednesday ushered in the start of Egypt's annual Ramadan season, when Muslims begin a monthlong period of fasting and religious reflection. The question many here are asking: Will the revolution take time off for the holiday? The military, which last week brought down Islamist President Mohamed Morsi, certainly hopes so. The military-led interim government is betting that Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood supporters will find it harder to sustain their protests demanding his reinstatement while simultaneously refraining from food, water and cigarettes from dawn to dusk.

The classroom swelters in 102-degree heat. The students, all boys in first and second grade, wipe the sweat off their faces as they bark out a spelling exercise in unison. " A-P-P-L-E, apple! B-O-X, box! M-O-N-K-E-Y, monkey!" School is back in session for the children of Swat, the verdant, mountainous valley that this year became the prime battlefield in the Pakistani military's bid to neutralize local Taliban groups. After more than two months of fighting, soldiers regained control of Swat's major towns, and thousands of refugees who fled the conflict have been returning home.

Glamour plus camping equals "glamping. " Thanks to this website, you'll never have to pitch a tent. Name: Glamping.com What it does: Sources glamorous camping options the world over - from floating lodges in Cambodia to luxe treehouses in Italy. What's hot: The site defines different glamping opportunities. I liked that it organized them both by destination and by categories, such as tents, villas and huts; cubes and eco-pods; yurts and tepees; and more. I found tented suites in Kenya, a Four Seasons tented camp in Thailand, solar-powered tents in Australia; and luxury yurts in Britain.

Oy, camping! My backpack is the size of a Honda Fit. It has 54 pockets, 27 zippers and a functioning spleen. It weighs as much as a 9-by-12 rug with a dead Soprano rolled up inside. To shed it at the end of a long hike is the sweetest thing imaginable. We have backpacked eight miles into the wilderness, no world record but nothing to sneeze at either, eight miles straight up a broken escalator. Eight miles from the nearest bucket of ice or cheeseburger, medium rare. Me, I get too far from cheeseburgers and I start to panic a little, my breath coming in short, troubled bursts.